Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story — Tony Chen, Microsoft

Here is an excellent talk about the Xbox One security (and Series X|S should be quite similar) by the person who is in charge of security on the Xbox platform. [VIDEO] Basically it boils down to trust NOTHING outside the actual SoC chip (so stuff like RAM, Flash/HDD, optical dics, etc cannot be trusted). The SoC is made on 28nm (Series X|S 7nm) process so physically attacking it is very hard/expensive. Also goes into the difference between Windows (PC) and Xbox (Console) security. On PC the owner/admin wants the help keep the system secure as it gets attacked by malicious parties from the internet. On console the owner is usually the bad guy (the one doing the attacking) and thus needs a very different approach. Also stuff like Microsoft Pluton are direct descendants of the stuff done for Xbox and Live.

DRM has only been successful in the space of making easily replicable attacks more expensive than what is being protected by the DRM. Microsoft has talked about this publicly in this great talk on the Xbox One's physical device security. 'We can't stop people hacking, but we can make each hack more expensive than what someone would spend on games on average'. [VIDEO] SGX running on centralized servers turns that calculus on it's head by concentrating the benefits of the hack all in one place.

There's a really good presentation, by a Microsoft Platform Security Engineer, detailing the lengths they went through to ensure only properly signed executables run on the Xbox One and really answers your question. One of the tools they developed, HVCI, was later incorporated into Windows Hyper-V. [VIDEO]

Obligatory link to the talk from MS where they covered the origins of Pluton on the Xbox: [VIDEO] The video does a good job of the original threat model for this technology and how it works on Xbox.

> would like to know how the answer is no TL;DR: cryptography and secure hardware (think TPM) This is a very interesting talk from Microsoft about how they made Xbox immune to physical attacks (modding) like you proposed. Now they are working on getting this tech into regular computers. [VIDEO] Of course, we don't know if the solution Mercedes used is as robust. For all we know it can be hacked in 1 minute.

This talk[1] was interesting watch wrt that. They made DRAM encrypted and Secure Boot seems to be done right too… 1: [VIDEO]

Modchips on newer Switches use fault injections (clock/voltage glitching) but there exist mitigations for those. The Xbox One is confirmed to use them. I encourage you to watch this video where Microsoft describes the security design of the Xbox One, which so far has been almost bulletproof. [VIDEO]

Guarding Against Physical Attacks: The Xbox One Story — Tony Chen, Microsoft: [VIDEO] I like this video too, Tony Chen explains the overview of Xbox security system.